


Silver Apples of the Moon

by FadesInTheSun



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: F/M, Silver Millennium Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-08 13:51:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 10,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16430630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FadesInTheSun/pseuds/FadesInTheSun
Summary: Princess Serenity and her Senshi try to win their hearts' desires by offering Prince Endymion and his Shitennou the thousand-year lifespans of the Silver Millennium. But the Queen had a reason for forbidding them to do this, and things will not go as well as they hoped...





	1. Mercury

**Author's Note:**

> All art is by the wonderful [passionrice](https://www.deviantart.com/passion-assassin), who took my words and ran with them with glee. Thanks as ever to smokingbomber for beta.

Mercury slid the little black stone figure of her queen across the board, a diagonal advance to reinforce her bishop, and then turned her head to admire the fountain not far across the palace gardens. There wasn’t all that much else to admire, granted. The sky was too open without the reassurance of a crystal dome to hold the air safely in. The greenery, similarly unprotected and open to the vagaries of atmosphere and weather, was approaching a dormancy phase of its life cycle, leaving most of it distinctly more brown than green.

Admiring her opponent was technically possible, but at the moment she was much more interested in playing the game with him than in being amused by his preening.

Zoisite frowned down at the board, twisting a curl around the end of his finger. Then frowned harder, and twitched his king a single square further away from the threat. “This is to teach me why not to turn down your offer of a handicap, isn’t it.”

Mercury ducked her head and lifted a hand, almost stifling a giggle. Almost. On the way back down, her hand reached across to his side of the board and shifted her bishop.

A white knight countered the bishop, claiming it. Mercury let her queen chase his king a little further, then shifted her attention, advancing a pawn halfway across the board in a single step.

She watched Zoisite trace the chain reaction of forced moves and future follow-up, watched him think through the sacrifice of most of her major pieces … watched him find the outcome, and let out a long and somehow tragic breath, and reach out to tip his king onto its side before sagging dolefully in his chair as if about to follow it. “What’s that. The third game in a row I’ve lost to you? Or the thirtieth?”

“The third today,” Mercury answered. “Last time you didn’t turn down the handicap, and you won the last game then.” She paused. “If you’re only counting games where we both have the same number of pieces, the fourteenth.”

Zoisite gave her his most winsomely woeful look, eyes and their fluttering lashes not quite screened by his hair. He pressed a folded hand to his chest. “My poor men. How can I bear to fail them so often and so deeply?”

“Choose your battles more cleverly,” Mercury suggested, reaching to begin setting up the pieces again.

“This  _ is _ more cleverly. I remember what happened the last time you got near a deck of cards.” Zoisite straightened up, then picked up his king and balanced it lightly in his fingers, regarding it with a show of mock-mourning. “Ah, well. The way of all flesh.”

Mercury’s hand wavered for a moment, and knocked over a rook; she caught hastily at the little tower before it had any chance to roll off the table. The last thing she needed was to drop a piece to the ground and shatter it. She kept her eyes down firmly on her fingers.

“Princess?”

She bit her lip instead of answering, and offered Zoisite back his captured pawns.

He didn’t take them. “Princess, are you all right?”

“Yes,” she lied, and was convinced instantly that her voice by itself gave her away. “I’m fine. Really. I just … wish we really could play something on an even basis. I mean. Something that isn’t just purely random.“

“Maybe we could.”

She glanced up to him in startlement. He hadn’t tried to pry, hadn’t challenged the transparent deceit, hadn’t prodded further at her mood. He  _ always _ tried to pry. With everyone she’d seen him interact with, he always pushed, always worked around corners and edges, always tried to win little scraps and fragments of information, to learn something. To learn everything. But right now, for whatever reason, he was letting her get away with it.

She swallowed, and reached further to set his pawns back in their proper places herself. “What do you have in mind?”

Zoisite gave her a warm and winning smile, and if there was concern behind it, or if he’d taken offense at her evasion, no hint of it showed. “Your friend from Jupiter,” he said, “mentioned that you liked music.”

She blinked at him. “Oh. Oh! Oh, yes. Do you play? Do you think we could—?”

“I think so,” he said. “If you’ll work from our music, or play enough of yours for me to learn it.”

He could, she knew. He learned faster than anyone else she’d ever met, except herself; and when it came to mimicry, to taking something and copying it exactly, he might actually work faster than she did. Not deriving the principles, not understanding all the implications; that took him more time and concentrated thought. But imitation he could do, and that would be all they needed for this. “Yes. I’d like that.”

His smile brightened a little further. He rose and offered her his arm.

She set her hand in the curve of it, leaving the chess set behind for any other players that might appear. And concentrated on the warmth and solidity under her fingers, the layers of muscle that curved over deceptively slender bones, and not on the ghost that shadowed his earlier words and the brown-tinged garden.

Not on the way that someday, only a century or so in the future, she would still look almost exactly as she did now … and those slender bones would be all that was left of him.

She could think of no handicap to even that.

[](http://i.imgur.com/rK9ljCa.jpg)


	2. Serenity

“There they go.” Endymion didn’t laugh, not really, but the warmth in his voice and the way his hand tightened gently on hers was better than a laugh would’ve been from anyone else. “Just like you thought. You win, this time.”

“Of course I do.” Serenity tilted her head up to smile at her prince. “Either I win, so I win, or you win, and that makes you smile, and I get to see it. So I win no matter what happens. It’s all part of my clever plan!”

She shifted a little to peek past Endymion’s shoulder, then a little more to peek past his cape and its habit of getting in the way. It made up for inconvenience in other ways, though, so she forgave it. “They don’t exactly look happy, though.”

“That’s not really a surprise. They’ll both be happier indoors, where Mercury doesn’t have to wonder who else might be watching, and Zoisite knows it’ll be him surprising anyone else coming and not the other way around.” Her prince gave her a smile anyway, even if he’d lost the bet, just because making people happy made him happy. “He won’t get in trouble for it, either. I made sure that he and Nephrite were assigned to escort your Senshi, not to guard me. Well. So far as they’ve got official assignments at all. Officially, the two of them are off duty right now. Since officially there’s nobody but us boys here.”

“Officially,” Serenity sighed, “is so annoying. Do we have to think about it?”

“No. Except that officially, it’s too beautiful a day out to waste.” Endymion leaned forward and kissed her on the top of her head, in front of and between the buns. “There won’t be many more like this before winter. Maybe not any.”

“Not _any_?” Serenity found herself suddenly torn between cuddling in closer against Endymion’s chest, and spinning away to stare out at the garden and take it in while she could. She settled for clutching at the cloth of his jacket and turning her head till the strain hurt her neck. “That’s not fair! The roses only just started blooming again! And I haven’t even met those purple flowers yet! They shouldn’t have to go away!”

Her prince laughed, but it was that gentle laugh that said he wasn’t really laughing _at_ her, just laughing because the world kept insisting on not being what Serenity thought it should be, even when what she thought it should be would be better. He wrapped his free arm around her, reassuring, safe. “You can meet them today,” he promised her. “And the roses will be back in the spring, before you even know it. Winter’s only a few months long. It might be spring by the next time you get a chance to visit anyway.”

“I wouldn’t wait that long,” she told him firmly. “I want to get to really see your winter, this time. Nobody would let me go out last time, so I only got to find out about snow from windows. I didn’t get to _do_ anything with it.”

“We’ll make sure to have warm clothes that fit you,” Endymion told her. “And boots. Boots were really the problem last time. If you went out in the snow in those slippers you were wearing, your toes would have frozen, and your toes are much too delicate to let freeze.”

She curled her toes protectively, but snuck a look back at him all the same, wary. “You’ve never seen my toes.”

“Your toes are attached to you,” Endymion explained. “That’s all I need to know to know I don’t want them frozen.”

“I don’t want them frozen, either.” Serenity tried frowning sternly at the air, but Earth air was like Lunar air that way: it never seemed to take her expressions seriously, and it certainly didn’t listen to instructions. She sighed. “Can’t we just … not have winter? Make it stop now, and just stay like this? With everything still green and with the roses blooming and with all of us here and nobody telling us we shouldn’t be, or we can’t be, or everything’s going to go wrong? We could live in the garden. In tents. I don’t know what we’d eat.”

“We have orchards,” Endymion said solemnly. “We could eat apples.”

“We could eat apples!” Serenity echoed in delight. “Apples and apple pies and apple cakes and apple … um …”

“Apple cider,” Endymion suggested. “Applesauce.”

“Apple … tarts?”

Endymion laughed. “Maybe we should find something to eat besides apples.”

She leaned her head in against his chest. It made his sleeve get in the way of looking at the garden, so she closed her eyes instead. “Wouldn’t you like it to stay like this forever, though?”

“A beautiful day, spent with you, knowing my friends are happy, and knowing your friends are glaring at me in constant unsubtle warning? Of course I would.”

Serenity jerked upright and let go of his hand, twisting in his arm to try to get a look. Mercury wasn’t there, and Jupiter was already off somewhere, but Mars was keeping watch — well, Mars always had that look on her face, that didn’t count as glaring — and Venus was … “Does scowling count as glaring?”

“Scowling counts as making me happy that your friends love you enough to worry,” Endymion answered. “And to take good care of you. Even if it’s personally inconvenient for us.”

“You’re just saying that because you think Venus might be able to read lips.”

Endymion laughed again; she felt it against her back more than she heard it, and that warmed her, too, like a secret just between the two of them. “Not _just_. But it does help. Besides, with the amount that she yells at you, I think she likes having something to be indignant about. So we’ll count your friends as happy, too.”

He drew a deep breath, one that pushed against her and made them closer, then kept the closer as he breathed out again. “A beautiful day. And everyone happy.”

“And the roses,” Serenity added.

“And the roses. If we had to pick one day to stay in forever, this would be a pretty good one.”

She turned again, tugging her gown straight with an absent hand, and threaded her own arms around his waist. “If we could only stay.” So many things would be so much easier. So many things she’d been warned about, never coming to pass.

Endymion kissed her forehead, this time. “At least,” he said, “we can stay in it while it’s here.”

She smiled down against him, then tilted her head back and arched her back a little, and the next kiss was better, and the one after that was better even than his smiles. Winter would have to wait.


	3. Venus

“They look ridiculous,” Venus complained. “Have the two of them even gotten as much as six inches apart from each other since we got here? It’s like she’s _glued_ to him. And he makes her look tiny! She looks perfectly normal at home, it’s only here that she looks like somebody chopped off half her height and turned it all into hair. Which is going to wind up with leaves and twigs and dirt in it. All through it. It’s going to be absolute hell trying to get it out before it gets on the floor and tells everyone in the entire palace where she vanished off to while we were supposed to be reading.”

Kunzite was, irritatingly, not watching the pair of misbehaving young royals with her. He was also not watching her. He was leaning with his back against the trunk of one of the decorative trees, one small enough that he needed to tilt his head to the side to avoid a lower limb. His eyes were closed. The only evidence that he wasn’t actually napping on his feet while she was talking was that he said out loud, “So, precisely like every other visit of hers. Or yours.”

Venus attempted to stab him with a glare. Possibly because of shut eyelids, she couldn’t actually draw blood, which just made her scowl more. “There are _bugs_ in Earth dirt, Kunzite.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m aware.”

“They _crawl_.”

“Or squirm. Worms aren’t much for crawling.”

Venus felt her lips draw back from her teeth in an involuntary horrified grimace. She stamped a foot on the ground just in case the worms were getting any idea. “That is disgusting! And you _live_ on this stuff?”

“That’s why we developed the fine art of construction. Tile. Mosaics. Wooden floors.”

“You _make your floors out of dead things_.”

He finally cracked an eye open to study her. “Tile is made out of clay. Clay is not dead things.”

“Clay _could_ be dead things.” Venus folded her arms and glared at him. “It’s in dirt, isn’t it? And dirt is part dead things.”

The other eye opened, and his eyebrows arched upward. “Is that an improvement or not? You were just complaining about dirt being part live things.”

She made first a horrified noise, and then a determined attempt to scrabble up his body in order to get hold of that low branch. The hand that got his cape did not have good enough purchase to pull this off. Kunzite gave a surprised grunt and caught at her, possibly out of reflex, possibly to try to avoid being choked by his own collar at the yank. His jacket gave before either the cape or Venus’s grip did, tearing sharply at the shoulder with a startlingly loud sound.

Kunzite froze in place, Venus half supported in his arms, her knee still lifted almost to his waist. She glanced up at his face; he was staring out at —

Oh.

For a moment, she was thoroughly miffed that she’d finally gotten him into something that at least resembled a compromising position — in front of Serenity, no less! Something to counter-gloat about when Serenity was wrapping herself up in wistfulness and woe over missing her precious Earth prince! — _completely by accident_. When none of the times she’d tried on purpose had ever worked.

After a moment, Kunzite shook his head in a negative, and Venus imagined Endymion having signalled some kind of ‘is there trouble?’ to prompt it. She draped herself deliberately against Kunzite’s shoulder, then remembered the rip in the cloth, and put a hand up to explore it.

Kunzite removed her hand firmly before she had a chance to discover if it went far enough to harbor skin instead of shirt. “Words, Venus. We use words on this planet. Like ‘ask’ and occasionally even ‘permission.’”

“Have you ever asked for permission in your entire life?” Venus demanded. He was not, she noticed, attempting to remove her from leaning on him.

“When it was warranted, yes.” He hadn’t actually let go of her hand either. “For instance, it’s generally bad manners to start a war without the permission of one’s lord. Therefore, when not justified by emergency or practice, I ask the prince’s permission before drawing a blade.”

Venus shrugged her shoulders, letting the motion push her almost imperceptibly against him. “I’m not even carrying one.” Technically. Something she could summon in an instant but that wasn’t on her person counted as not carrying.

Kunzite drew up her hand. His lips brushed the back of her gloved fingers. “Aren’t you.”

She snatched her hand back, spun away, sidestepped, and then — facing away from him — stepped back to lean casually against whatever was close enough to offer support, and pretended very hard that more of it was the tree than his side. “I hate you.”

“Yes. Well. Clearly it would only be courtesy to a guest to permit her to carry out her assassination unimpeded.”

She stopped pretending long enough to put an elbow into that side, and pretended even harder that in a few years — when he grew old enough that the demands for someone to manage his affairs while he dealt with Endymion’s were too great, let alone the demands for heirs to replace him when in a couple of short decades his blade slowed in his hand or his spine and his joints decayed from riding; when, in short, he had to turn to someone he could marry — she wouldn’t miss these games at all.


	4. Mars

“She’s _crawling_ on him,” Mars said in open disgust. “What kind of an example is that to set? How exactly is she supposed to be watching out for our princess when she’s literally trying to climb inside your commander’s clothes?”

Jadeite coughed, then followed it up with a couple more before he managed words. “That … was not something I ever wanted to see. Even in my mind’s eye. Please no.”

Mars glanced back his way, scornful … or making herself as scornful as she could where he could see her, anyhow. Even if her traitor mouth was curling up a little on the far side. “Weak.”

“Not weak,” Jadeite protested. “I just have to be able to face him over breakfast in the mornings. That means I have to be able to get through an entire meal, and conversation after it, without snickering. Every day.” He glanced around for a moment, finding a distant place where there should have been a faint hint of color visible through the green of a hedge. Several seconds meant that the wind tossed the leaves enough that he should definitely have been able to see it. If it were still there. “Huh. Zoisite relocated.”

“Mercury too? Really?” Mars shot a glare in the same direction he was looking. “ _Mercury_ , of all people. And Jupiter vanished with the one with all the hair straightaway. Apparently nobody else actually thinks that doing their job is important today. You people are rotten influences, all of you.”

“You know, I’d be really happy if you wouldn’t put me in the same category with Nephrite,” Jadeite said from his place behind her. “I’m a completely different kind of rotten influence.”

“I don’t care which category you’re in. You’re both annoying.”

“Guilty as charged.”

There were a few seconds of silence; just the wind in the leaves, and the sound of Venus’s laughter that it carried. Mars didn’t check to see whether she and the white-haired one were still on their feet or not. She didn’t want to know.

“If you wanted,” Jadeite said finally, “I could go over and cover one of the other quarters. Since we’re down two sets of watchers. I mean, I know we get along fine with two, or one, but we don’t _have_ to stay absolutely paired up. As long as we stay in sight of each other, we can both vouch for the other not getting up to anything.”

Mars darted a glance his way, briefly suspicious. But only suspicious of his motives, she had to grant. Most of the Earth prince’s guards she couldn’t say that for; but this one she’d have been willing to leave Serenity alone with for five minutes, if she had to. He wouldn’t cause trouble in that time. If nothing else, if he’d been secretly assigned to assassinate her princess, he’d spend the entire time trying to work himself up to it. If she gave him a half-hour for that imaginary secret assignment, he might actually get around to knocking the princess unconscious, but he’d probably tuck her in in a featherbed and sit and fret about whether or not to do anything more. When he had to, he could be lethally effective; but like Mercury or Jupiter, he was too soft-hearted to be a real threat against someone he thought was nice.

Jadeite offered her a smile. It warmed his eyes, a firmer contrast to his hesitant words. “I just thought you might be happier if you didn’t have to put up with any of us.”

She drew a breath to tell him that as annoying as they might be, they were transient annoyances, like being accompanied by a quartet of mosquitoes. But his hesitation was, just for an instant, contagious.

Which only annoyed her more, of course.

“We stay where we were posted,” she snapped at him. “ _Someone_ should do what they said they were going to, tonight.”

His smile didn’t actually broaden; it faded. But the warmth in his eyes stayed. Maybe a little brighter.

She scowled, and folded her arms, and turned back to watch over her princess. She could put up with being annoyed for a while. Her own people did it often enough.

[](https://i.imgur.com/NAjV3k6.jpg)


	5. Jupiter

Nephrite led Jupiter through the gardens, but it was Jupiter, really, who was making the decisions; she could mention a leaf shape half-seen across four other pathways, or point vaguely in the direction of an interesting flower, and Nephrite would take her there.  Even when she asked about the kitchen garden, where they might have been seen by anyone. Well, he didn’t take her quite there, that was true. But he took her to a place where she could stand in a nook, and part the leaves of trellised vines growing on a wooden lattice, and look to her heart’s content; and when she asked about some of the plants, he went out himself, and brought her back fragrant snippets of marjoram and sage, and of half a dozen more that she couldn’t name and he, watching the stars more often than the ground, couldn’t name for her.

She sniffed at one he’d taken from the shade of a low wall, and considered it.  “It looks like parsley,” she said. “But it isn’t, is it?”

Nephrite shook his head.  “I don’t remember the name; it’s not something that’s traded, it doesn’t keep its flavor when it’s dried.  I asked about it once and got quite the lecture from one of the cooks.” His eyes took on that intent, too-serious look they got sometimes.  “I could ask again, if you liked.” Unspoken, but all too clear: he could ask about _all_ of them.

She felt her cheeks starting to redden, and glanced down at the little leaves, following the feathery little divisions, marking the way the leaves spread out from the stem; three together, then two paired, then the stem itself branching for a pair of sets of three. “I think,” she said, and met his eyes again, “I’d like that.” Her smile started somewhere in the word ‘like.’  “If it’s not any trouble for you? You have so many things to keep track of already.”

“I could write it down for you,” he suggested.  “Not that I could send you a letter, but writing about herbs and recipes is surely innocuous enough.”

“That sounds like even more trouble.”  But Jupiter was still smiling as she lowered her eyes back to the leaves, bruised one, sniffed at it again.  “But it would be very kind of you. Especially things like this, that like to live in the shade.”

Nephrite took on that little hint of a frown that spoke more of perplexity than of disapproval.  “Why would you — ah.” On cue, the hint vanished again, yielding to an almost triumphant smile. “Of course.  Jupiter’s five times as far from the Sun as Earth; full sunlight there must be close to full shadow here.”

“A little darker,” Jupiter admitted.  And they didn’t actually live on Jupiter itself.  But that was more detail than was worth going into.  “But plants that thrive in the shade here, we’d only need to concentrate the sunlight a little to keep healthy.  That might save us energy.”

“I didn’t know anywhere in the Silver Millennium needed to worry about a lack of power,” Nephrite said; and yes, there was a shadow of bitterness in the words, but the more overt concern seemed sincere.  “Is your home in some kind of trouble?”

Jupiter had already started organizing an answer to the question she’d _expected_ Nephrite to ask.  Which was … not that one. She tilted her head back in surprise, seeking out his telltale eyes again; but if anything, they’d found a way to look more intent, not less.

He really was worried.

She wasn’t entirely sure how to deal with that.

“No,” she said after a moment.  “No trouble. But it’s … energy’s like anything else, isn’t it?  No matter how many fields you sow with grain, if you find a way to keep insects out better or cut down on blights, then in the end you can bake more bread.  Feed more people, or feed them better, than you would’ve been able to before. If we can save energy on growing things, even a little, then in the end we’ll have energy to use to help people in other ways.”

Nephrite closed his eyes for a moment.  Jupiter hesitated, uncertain of why. But it didn’t take her more than a moment to understand, and she could have kicked herself.  Energy to help people. But not his people, not in any way he knew about or could be allowed to understand. The Silver Millennium’s people, with Earth standing outside.  And Nephrite —

Nephrite exiled from the garden that was the Silver Millennium.  She imagined him peeking through the leaves of a trellised vine, occasionally snuck a few clippings from plants growing inside, allowed to study them in isolation, in fragments, in death and dying.

Even if the scents were beautiful, it couldn’t be good for him.


	6. Serenity and the Senshi

“It’s not fair.”

It was Serenity who said it first, of course.  She stood with her hands resting on the railing, staring out and up at the half-Earth hanging in the sky, trying to make out which bit of white was a continent under a temporary blanket of snow, and which an even more transient cloud.

“How many winters do they get to see?  What is it on average? Forty, fifty?”

Mars looked up to the heavens for an entirely different reason.  “Seventy,” she said. “Adults live to seventy often enough.”

“But they start getting _old_ earlier than that,” Serenity protested.  “It’s not fair! They get less than a tenth of what we do, they spend the first third of it just growing up, and they spend the last third of it just falling apart.  They don’t get _anything_. No wonder they’re so far behind us on everything. They never get a chance to learn enough to get anything done!”

“They do better than they used to,” Jupiter offered.  “And they’ll keep doing better. Prince Endymion is good at figuring out what’s not good for people.  He’ll help a lot.”

“While he’s there,” Serenity said wistfully.

Jupiter and Venus exchanged glances.  There weren’t any tears. The princess wasn’t sniffling, and wasn’t taking advantage of their relative privacy to let herself wail.  That wasn’t entirely like her.

The quiet tapping of one more set of feet pulled both their attention over to the side; but it was only Mercury, back from her meeting.  “Jupiter,” she said, “you were right. It wasn’t a boron or calcium imbalance, it was insufficient nitrates to balance out the calcium resulting in —”

“Mercury I love you but if the princess falls off the balcony because her eyes are crossing too hard to let her balance the Queen is going to strangle us all.”  Venus waved her hands. “Less periodic table, more sense!”

Mercury blushed and ducked her head, despite that her blue hair was far too short to actually hide behind.  “Um,” she said, stalling for a moment while she put what she was trying to say into less technical terms. “There’s always been a problem growing silver apples; a lot of them get sick when they’re small, and fall off the tree before they’re old enough to work properly.  Jupiter had an idea a few years ago about why, and brought some soil samples back from Earth that we were able to look at and … figure things out from.”

Venus relaxed a little at the near-miss.

“And she was right?” Serenity prompted, turning away from the Earth to give Mercury one of her better hopeful looks.

“And she was right.  Her idea let us resolve part of the problem, so more of the apples made it to harvest this year.  And we were planning to have apples for all the children who need them even if the new techniques _didn’t_ work, so we have extra — we can actually store some.”  Mercury’s smile for Jupiter was tiny, but delighted. Joy concentrated into a shining of blue eyes. “So if anything goes badly wrong, if some of the trees get sick themselves … we have a margin to cover that, now.  An emergency won’t mean that people have to get old, or die.”

Mars cocked her head, aiming a glance somewhere between Mercury and Jupiter to cover them both.  “Well done.”

Jupiter took her own turn to blush.  “It wasn’t anything special. It was just an idea.”

“But it was a _good_ idea,” Serenity said, actually stepping away from the railing now.  She crossed the distance between herself and Jupiter, and stood on tiptoe to attempt to kiss Jupiter on the cheek.  Jupiter ducked just a little to make it easier for her. “And it’s an idea that’s going to save a lot of people a lot of hurt.”  The tiny princess’s gaze flickered back Earthward just for a moment, but she didn’t say anything about it, only leaned in against Jupiter’s shoulder.

Venus decided that this was probably not the time to ask when, exactly, Jupiter had gotten those soil samples from Earth, and if it was early enough that they’d been a factor in this year’s harvest, whether or not Serenity had caught her sneaking down to Earth for them and gotten ideas.

Mars picked up the role of spoilsport for her.  “Your Highness,” she said to Serenity, which told everyone else exactly what was coming.  “We _can’t_ grow enough silver apples for that whole planet. We don’t have the resources.  And we can’t interfere like that, anyhow; the Queen has rules in place for good reasons. Earth isn’t prepared to handle that kind of lifespan extension.  They’d overrun the entire planet before you could blink; the first generation of their Millennium wouldn’t die from old age, they’d die in wars and famines.  They need to grow up first.”

_Apple cider,_ Serenity thought.  _Applesauce_.  But what she said aloud was, “Of course we can’t!  Don’t be silly. We don’t need enough for the whole planet.”

Venus actually flinched.  “Serenity —”

“Princess Mercury,” Serenity went straight on, ignoring her, pulling herself upright and into her most formal posture, and turning to the senshi she addressed.  “Would you be so kind as to consider how many silver apples remain for storage from this blessed harvest, after all those living in need of them are accounted for?  And would you also be so kind as to consider a projection of how many children are likely to be born with conditions that would impair their proper lifespans, and can be remedied by a silver apple, before the next harvest is due … and then to tell us all how many apples are likely to still be safely in storage when the next harvest comes in?”

Mercury stared at Venus, helpless.  Venus tried to will her to suddenly remember an appointment with someone who outranked their Princess.  Unfortunately, the number of possibilities there were, well, few, and not likely to have been forgotten.  Also, no convenient messengers arrived.

Venus might have settled for a meteor impact, honestly, but the skies weren’t siding with her tonight either.

“Fourteen,” Mercury said faintly.

“That’s good.”  Serenity nodded, less in satisfaction than as an outward marker of a decision.  “We only need five.”

The gathering fell silent for the space of three heartbeats.

Jupiter was the first one to break  “Serenity, _no_.”

Mercury gave her a mildly scandalized look at the lack of proper address, but no-one else there was taking the time to care.  Mars advanced three steps. “This is _not_  happening. You are _not_  stealing from the _queen_. Especially not for that — that — _boy_!”

“Of course not!”  Serenity ducked to Jupiter’s other side, evading Venus’s attempt to catch her arm.  “Not just for him. I said five. I wouldn’t leave you four on your own!”

“What makes you think we’d want —” Mars caught sight of Jupiter’s expression, and stopped short.  “Don’t tell me you’re actually _thinking_  about this stupid idea!”

“I’m not!”  Jupiter’s protest was less convincing, this time.  “I mean — I’ll miss Nephrite, when the time comes, but it’s not —”  Her lips shaped the first two syllables of ‘important,’ but she couldn’t get the word itself out.  “— not something we do! We don’t steal things!” She revived a little with that last, and gave Serenity a sterner look again.

“It’s not stealing!”  Serenity curled her hands at her sides, somehow managing to keep her chin up.  “It’s not. They’re _always_ given to people who need them, aren’t they? That’s all this is!  And Mother always has me give them out. So it’s my job to. It’s just me doing my job! Just — quietly.”

“That’s not how that works!”  Mars flung her hands in the air.  “If that was how it worked, we could just _ask_!”

“We don’t take magic to Earth!” Venus agreed.  “At least, we don’t _give_ magic to Earth! They have to grow up on their own!”

“We’re not giving it to Earth, we’re giving it to people!”  Serenity put one hand on Jupiter’s shoulder, and gestured outward past the railing with the other.  “And we don’t have to take it to Earth! We can sneak them _here_. And give them the apples _here_.  The apples never have to touch Earth!”

“That doesn’t _help_!”  Mars and Venus managed that one in unison.

Serenity appealed to the last one to stay out of the argument.  “Mercury. Do you really want to spend most of your life knowing you’ll never play a game against Zoisite again?  Is there anybody else who’s actually a challenge for you sometimes — and who pays that close attention to how you’re feeling — at the same time?”

Mercury bit her lower lip, and looked away.

“Venus,” Serenity continued.  “What would it be like never, ever to be able to argue with Kunzite again?  Jupiter — how can you bear knowing how soon it’ll be before Nephrite looks at you like that for the last time ever?  How can you not go through every day thinking about that? I can’t — every time I see the sky, I think about the Earth; every time I think about the Earth, I think about Endymion, and his quick little life passing by, breath by breath, and I’m not _there_ , I can’t be there, and it’s not _fair_ —”

“Stop it!” Jupiter yelped.  And then winced, and put her hand over Serenity’s on her shoulder before the princess could pull it back.  “Your Highness — I know it hurts, but it’s just — that’s the way things have to be.”

“But they _don’t_ have to be like that,” Serenity said softly.  “That’s the whole point. We can _change_ it. Not for everybody.  But at least for us.”

Jupiter eased Serenity’s hand off of her shoulder, gentle, and shifted her hold as she turned to face her directly.  But she didn’t, quite, seem to be able to manage words.

“It’s not our decision to make.”  Mars’ voice was lower, but no less caustic.

Serenity countered it with that same softness.  “Why not?”

Mars frowned at her.  “Because it’s the Queen’s.”

Serenity squeezed Jupiter’s fingers lightly, then let go of them.  “I’m the Queen,” she said. “I’m the Queen who hasn’t started being Queen yet.  But I’m still the Queen. So it’s my decision.”

This time, Mars stared openly.  “That doesn’t even make any sense.”

“Mars,” Mercury said very softly, and Mars turned her glare on the smallest of the senshi, visibly ready to tear her open with words alone if any insinuation were made about her having some sort of emotional attachment.  Serenity’s appeals over the short-lived men they cared for had pushed Jupiter, the strongest of them, back. Had brought Venus, the quickest of them, to a standstill. Mars meant to hold fast.

But all Mercury said was, “Please.”

Mars hesitated.  She pivoted on her heel, seeking support from Venus —

— and found Venus studiously examining a very long lock of her hair, held taut across two fingers.

“Tell me you’re not thinking about this.”

Venus didn’t blink.  “Well,” she said. “I’m just thinking.  What’s that Earth saying? One bad apple shoots fish in a barrel?”  She kept talking over Jupiter’s pained noise. “Not all the apples they harvest stay good in storage, do they?  So if Mercury could identify, say, the worst third, wouldn’t it make sense not to waste energy on keeping them?”

Serenity drew a sharp breath, then caught up her skirts with a hand and rushed the handful of steps to collide into a hug with Venus.

Mars folded her arms.  “I am _not_ going to explain this to your mother when we get caught.”

Jupiter glanced at Mercury, saw her tiny silent smile, and sighed.  “So we’ll just have to not get caught.”

“You’re planning on making five prominent Earthers stay young for fifteen times their natural lifespan, and you don’t think anybody’s going to _notice_?” Mars demanded.

“By the time they do,” Serenity said firmly, “it’ll be too late.”


	7. Zoisite

The table between them bore a chessboard, but no pieces this time:  not the elegant abstract ones that the Moon used, silver and crystal denoting the sides; not the carnelian and alabaster carvings that Zoisite had given Mercury eleven months ago, half of the little sculptures blending in with the unrelenting whites of the Silver Millennium’s preferences in decor, half standing out against it shocking as a blood-splash.  No pieces at all. Instead, the apple that rested in the center of the board reflected warped and distorted versions of their living figures in its silver skin.

Zoisite considered whether this made them part of the game.  Mercury with the queen’s unrivalled scope, straightforward and swift, flexible and far-reaching.  Zoisite with the knight’s leap and twist. Each of them able to evade the other indefinitely: inescapable stalemate, until others involved themselves.

It wasn’t a terrible omen, necessarily.  But it sat poorly with him all the same.

Mercury stirred, folding her hands together.  Glanced down at them, then at the apple, then up at him for the briefest of moments before her hands reclaimed her attention.  “I thought — it would make things even between us.”

A laugh bubbled up, and Zoisite let it.  The grin that followed was genuine. Almost kind.  “Never even,” he told her. “Even if you could give me a thousand years, it wouldn’t be enough to let me catch up with you.”  The queen, leaping the length of a file in an instant, one side of the board to another. The knight, taking four moves to catch up with her.

And pretending, for the moment, that he had no ability to see things from angles she couldn’t.

“But that’s it,” Mercury said, her words quicker now.  Something she needed to talk about; didn’t want to, but needed to push through.  “It can give you a thousand years. You have legends about apples that give immortality, or eternal youth.  Most legends have a core of truth, somewhere. For those stories, the truth is here. Not everyone in the Silver Millennium is born aging properly.  So we made something to fix it. And it — this can fix you. All you have to do is take it. Eat it. The magic will work from there.”

That was unfair.  It was supposed to be the knight who blindsided other pieces.  The one move that the queen could never duplicate. Mercury wasn’t supposed to take the one thing that let Zoisite sometimes keep ahead of her.

But then, the reflections in the apple weren’t their real faces.  They weren’t actually in the game. Weren’t limited to it.

Weren’t limited to the immediate choices.

Zoisite drew a slow and careful breath.  “Do I have to decide now?”

Mercury bit at her lower lip.  “No,” she said. “But — I’m not supposed to have this.  Not supposed to give it to you. The longer you take to make up your mind, the harder it will be for me to keep it hidden.  The best we’re hoping for is that by the time anyone realizes what we did, it’ll be too late to take the years back from you.”

Her eyes flickered up to him again, and Zoisite could read the unspoken message in them clearly.   _ I don’t want to lose you so soon. _

“I could take it with me,” he suggested.  “You wouldn’t need to keep it hidden if it weren’t here.”

The unspoken message vanished, drowned out by a slow-gathering and deep sadness.  “No,” she said, much softer. “No. I … know what you do. And I can’t let you. Not for that.”

“I hide things,” Zoisite said, his smile easier, gentler, reassuring.  “It’s all right.”

“And you copy things.”  Mercury pulled her hands down into her lap.  “You see magic, and you figure out how to make it work, and how you can do it.  I can offer this to you. Just to you. I can’t … offer you the ability to offer it to everyone.  So you can’t take it with you. You can say yes, or you can say no, but …. only for you.”

_Even Endymion?_  Zoisite killed the question before he could ask it.  There was no good answer. And the more important answer was lying in front of them.

She wanted to make things even between them.  But not even in a way that would let him offer the same decision to others that she was offering him, here and now.

Only even in a way that let her keep him.

He rose to his feet, and came around the table, and put a hand tentatively on her far shoulder.  She leaned toward him; he took the unspoken permission, and bent to press a kiss to her hair. “Shh,” he whispered to her.  “Shh. It’s all right.”

He did not have to tell her his answer in any more words than that.  And though she wept against him, she understood well enough to accept the no for what it was.


	8. Endymion

Beyond the railing, the Earth hung gibbous in the sky, full of deeper colors and more unpredictable patterns than anything else that could be seen from the Serenities’ lunar palace.  As a hiding place, this spot with this view was a terrible one; anyone looking for the princess would look here first.

By the same token, though, the princess’s presence here would give no-one any reason for surprise.  It was only Endymion that they had to sneak here, not the both of them.

And the brilliant shine of her eyes when she could see him and the Earth at once was more than enough reason to go along with her request.

Well … with the first of her requests.

Endymion covered her hands with his, cupping them with a gentle warmth, without quite ever touching what she held in them to offer him.  “Explain that again?” he asked. “I hear you, but I’m not sure I quite understand.”

Serenity turned her hands at the wrists, pressing the strange apple she held in them upward toward him, pressing the backs of her thumbs and index fingers down into his larger hands.  Her left moved just a little, scrubbing her delicate skin against the roughness of his calluses — somehow they always surprised her. Maybe because Venus used a sword, too, but its hilt left her hands untouched.

“I know that we’re not supposed to do this,” she said softly.  “That the gods forbid us from coming too close to the Earth. But it’s too late, isn’t it?  It’s been too late for a long time. And I can’t stand the thought of losing you, Endymion. I can’t bear to think about how long I’d have to live without you.  So please —” Her voice strengthened, not steadier, but quicker and better-supported, even as the pitch rose. “Please don’t make me! Please just — stay with me.  I know you can’t, on your own, but we can help.”

He pressed the backs of her fingers gently.  “You can make me live as long as you do,” he said.  It should have been a marvel to him. It was so much less of one than she was.

“And — and the others,” Serenity offered.  “We have one for each of you. None of you have to get left behind!”

“My Shitennou?”  Endymion smiled at her, and added, teasing, “Even the ones that are annoying you right now?”

“Jadeite doesn’t annoy Mars _that_ much!”

“Or else she’d have stopped putting up with him.”  Endymion freed one of his hands, lifting it to touch her cheek with three fingertips.  “But. One for each of my Shitennou? Or one for each person on Earth?”

The nervousness that had been hanging behind Serenity’s expression gathered, all of a sudden, and blossomed into a guilt intense enough to be palpable.  “... for each of the Shitennou,” she said, and her voice was smaller now. “We couldn’t — enough don’t exist for everyone on Earth. And we couldn’t hide that many from my mother, even if they did.”

“You love your mother.”  Endymion’s smile still lingered, full of endless affection, tinged only a little by sadness.  “And you love your Senshi. And you love everyone else on the Moon, don’t you?”

Serenity’s eyelashes flickered in a series of near-lightning blinks, as she tried to come around from that guilt to follow him.  “Of course I do,” she said. “They’re my people. Even if you don’t count that my mother’s the Queen, they’re still my people. Aren’t they?”

He leaned in to kiss her temple, and when she made a happier little sound, he lingered in the contact for a few moments.  “They are,” he agreed. “And the people on Earth are _my_ people.  All of them.  Every seamstress and servant, shepherd and laundress, baker and barber and beggar. Every farmer who puts grain into the ground and prays. Every soldier who risks their life to protect their people … and every soldier who risks their life for the next round of gambling away their pay, too.  I’m responsible for taking care of them.”

“But you could do it so much better —” Serenity tried to reach for his face in turn, but she nearly dropped the apple in the process, and scrabbled desperately against his embroidered jacket, catching it and almost losing it twice more before finally coming to a halt pressed up against his body with her hands tucked between them.

Endymion gave in and settled his arms around her.  “I bet I could, if I got to live fifteen times as long as anybody else,” he agreed.  “But it’s not about doing it better, Serenity. It’s about what’s fair. If this is only for me, or even only for the five of us … then what I would be doing …”  He stopped, searching for the words. “I know it isn’t literally true. But it feels like I would be ordering everyone else on Earth into a battle that I knew would kill them.  And all of them knowing that I wouldn’t be fighting alongside them. That I’d be safe behind the lines, untouched and untouchable. And I … I can’t do that. I can’t —”

The words came to him, then, and it was his own voice’s turn to grow much softer.  “I am honored and joyed beyond anything I can say that you want me with you badly enough to do this.  But if I accepted this, _and left the rest of my world behind_ … I wouldn’t be the man you want with you anymore.”

She tipped her head backward and looked up at him, her eyes beginning to overflow with tears.  Endymion couldn’t look at them; couldn’t close his eyes, either, not and shut her out. He bent his head to press his cheek against hers, and whispered in her ear.  “If your mother changes her mind. If we find some way to win your lifespans on our own. If, and by all the gods I hope this is not the way, your mother dies and you inherit and you can make that decision with a clear heart.  If we find  _ any _ way to bring all my world with me.  Then yes, Serenity. Yes, forever. But until then…”

“I know,” she whispered back, and stifled a sob.  “I know.”


	9. Kunzite

He held her gift in his hand, turned it to inspect it.  It looked as much metal as his sword’s blade. Felt no heavier than any other fruit.  It showed only the faintest hints of variegation, and no sign of bruising at all.

“If you’re looking for a worm,” Venus offered, “you’re not going to find one.”

“Aren’t I.”  Kunzite glanced up and aside at her, letting a hint of slyness play at the corners of his eyes, then swept his cape aside with his free hand and settled himself on the broad window-seat.  “I suppose you would know, being the creatrix of this wonder.”

Venus tossed her head.  “You’re mocking me. Again.  Why do I keep letting you think you can get away with that?”  Even as she complained, she perched herself barely an inch or two to his side.

Obligingly, he shifted the apple to his far hand, and gave her an arm to lean herself back into.  “Because I only bore you when we’re talking about official business.”

She prodded him in the side with a fingertip.  “That is _not_ a good enough reason.”

“You’ll have to have a stern talk with yourself about it, then.”

“I hate you.”

“Which is why you just broke at least half a dozen laws and possibly committed high treason to offer me immortality.  Yes. Obviously that’s hatred.”

Kunzite couldn’t see the roll of her eyes, but he could feel the shift of her head that went with it.  “ _High_ treason.  Nobody ever talks about _low_ treason.”

“Really?  They talk about petty treason on Earth.  Lesser betrayals. A soldier who stabs his commander; a housekeeper who slits her employers’ throats in the night.”

“Everything’s knives with you.”  Venus’s shoulders twitched in the way they did when she was taking a moment to make a face.  “Is that what’s wrong? Do I need to get you a knife? Do you only eat apples if somebody cuts them up into neat little slices for you first?”

He curled his hand a little more securely about her side.  A gesture more than any actual containment; if he’d actually tried to keep her from getting up whenever she had the mind to, she really would have stabbed him.  “No. Apples I eat. This isn’t an apple.”

“That is definitely an apple.  I saw the tree it grew off of.”

“No,” Kunzite said.  He kept the same playful tone, careful not to let it slide in any direction that might tell her anything.  “This is a spell. It only happens to look like an apple.”

She sniffed.  “It’s a good spell.”

“Very effective, I’m certain.  Very useful.” He squeezed her a little in his arm.  “I’m still not taking it. No more than you would if I offered you one.  Being under the direct influence of a foreign power isn’t either of our highest ambitions.”

“You don’t have anything like this to offer.”

“That would be another part of the problem, yes.”

She elbowed him, but more gently than the finger-prod, and in a less painful spot.  “You’re going to feel like an idiot when you find out Endymion’s going to live ten or fifteen times what you are, and you have to come back and stand there like a, a wet sheep, and ask if I’ll let you change your mind.”

For a moment, Kunzite almost regretted that their position made it impractical to poke her back.  “I have never in my life done _anything_ like a wet sheep.” He glowered at her hair until she leaned into his side again, a golden little glow of smugness against him.  “Also,” he said then, letting the seriousness creep into his voice at last, “you know that Endymion isn’t going to accept, either. Your princess believes he will, I’m sure.  But his integrity is stronger than his love for her.” At least, Kunzite hoped it was.

Venus drew in the air for a sigh, let it out more quietly than the indrawn breath.  “If it weren’t,” she admitted, “we’d have been a lot meaner about keeping her from meeting up with him.”

“And you know,” Kunzite continued, “that if Endymion says no, all the rest of us will too.”

She put her far hand up over her shoulder, hooking her gloved fingers over his arm, and said nothing.

“And, in fact, you knew that from the beginning.  That none of us would actually accept the Silver Millennium’s lifespan, not when it was offered like this.  If you had any doubt about that, you would never have let your princess try this in the first place; the only way you would let her steal from her own mother would be if you knew that whatever was stolen could be returned or replaced without lasting harm.”

That face-making shoulder-twitch made more of an impression when her movement also shoved his arm into her tightened fingers.  “Do you ever try being wrong?” she demanded. “Just as an experiment? To find out what it’s like? Maybe a hobby. You need a hobby more than anyone else in the entire solar system.”

“So it’s not enough for you to be right _first_ , is it.  You have to be right undetected. So you can hide behind the curtains and tip your nose up at the rest of the world.”  Kunzite tucked the priceless silver apple between her thigh and his, and reached across himself to settle his freed hand high on her near arm.  Not an embrace. Not precisely. Not quite not one, either. “You were right,” he said again, quieter. “You can take them back, now, and no-one but us will ever need to know it happened.”

Another loud breath and quiet sigh.  “I hate you,” she informed him, and squirmed around in his grasp to lace her arms around his waist.  But not before she had the apple safely in her hand.

[](https://i.imgur.com/EsJ8Dwd.jpg)


	10. Jadeite

Jadeite figured that he’d be sure whether he was dreaming or not under one of two circumstances.  First, if he woke up, that would pretty much answer the question. Second, if Mars got tired of impaling the distant targets and sank an arrow in him instead.

Which would answer the question a lot more permanently, come to think of it.

“I have to be misunderstanding this,” he said aloud.  “I mean. I know. You’ve told me twice already and if I try to make you tell me a third time, I’m going to have to explain to Endymion why I’ve got pieces missing.  But I keep trying, and I can’t find any explanation for this that doesn’t come out with you wanting me to stick around.”

She released her bowstring.  The impact echoed from the inanimate target, not from him.  Jadeite took a moment to breathe a little easier.

Mars chose and nocked her next arrow before speaking.  “Serenity wanted it.”

“Pardon my bluntness,” Jadeite said, “but Serenity wanting things influences your decisions about as effectively as a butterfly can pull a cart.”

Apparently Mars could aim effectively while also reflexively sputtering.  Jadeite filed that information away for future reference, thanked the target silently for absorbing another hit, and added a mental note to keep enjoying the use of all his limbs while he had it.

Mars drew herself up and turned on him, imperious in her red and white with the stark black background of her impossibly long hair.  Her consonants grew crisper and more precise, slicing syllables and words neatly into a measured tempo. “She is my princess. I owe her loyalty.”

Jadeite lifted both hands carefully, well apart from one another.  “I’m not questioning that. It’s just that she’s also … well … Serenity.  She can want something with all her heart, and still forget it exists five minutes later.  Her last birthday, I was completely convinced she’d get something shiny and forget _Endymion_ existed.  Which turned out to be dumb of me, because she got shiny things and just wanted to show them to him.  And then a month later she’d forgotten about the shiny things and was all about flowers. A month from now, she’ll probably have forgotten this whole idea ever happened.”

Her eyes narrowed slowly, fixed steadily on him, and the violet tinge to them glittered brighter.  Jadeite took a quick breath and added, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Then immediately wished he’d done anything else.  At all. Maybe it wasn’t too late to suddenly remember a pressing errand back on Earth.

“Were you intending to use your tongue to say anything worth hearing today?” Mars asked.  “Or have you just gotten tired of having it?”

Jadeite spread his hands, widening his own eyes a little to try to look like an easier and thus less interesting target.  “I just … do I even need to say anything? The world gives you visions. And this is … this is a pretty major thing you did.  I can’t imagine you wouldn’t’ve looked to try to find out what my answer would be.”

“You’d have to actually give an answer for that to work,” Mars retorted, still glaring past the long upper limb of her bow.  “Stop weaseling.”

His eyes closed again, and he bent his head, trying to stare at the ground by his feet through his eyelids.  He knew what he wanted to say. But he also knew what would happen if he said it.

Fabric rustled.  After a moment, another sharp impact sounded from the direction of the targets.

“I can’t,” he said at last.  “You know I can’t.”

Another arrow contributed its part to shredding the straw.  “I know.”

He risked a look up at her.  “You did see it.”

She didn’t look back.  “Yes.”

“You asked for a vision.  You knew what my answer was going to be.”

“Yes.”

Jadeite swallowed a momentary surge of irrational anger, opening his hands out of the fists they tried to make, and asked instead, “So why did you even bother?  You could’ve skipped the whole thing. Not let me know about it. Not carried the risk of my saying something to the wrong person.”

Mars’ second-to-last arrow hit home.  Then the last, clustered tightly enough to leave the target ragged and unusable.  She didn’t go to collect them; she kept her frown aimed at them, as if she were disappointed in some microscopic lack of precision on her own part.  After several breaths’ worth of scrutiny, she finally said, “Because there might have been a chance that I didn’t understand it correctly.”

He had to be misunderstanding that, too.  But he ran her words through from his memory again, and they still said the same thing.  The smile started before he could call it back; he was a little glad she wasn’t looking his way.

“You know,” he said, “I think that’s the most promising thing you’ve ever said to me.”

The look she shot him before she stalked off to get her arrows made him double-check his uniform for char.


	11. Nephrite

Jupiter brought Nephrite out into the gardens, where thin vines with white-streaked leaves twined around white pillars, where flowers opened delicate petals with faint pearlescent swirls of color.  The green of her gown reflected itself in the rest, made the living greens stronger for her presence, made her beauty echo itself in every direction. Still, he wished they could have met on Earth, where she not only strengthened the plants that surrounded her, but drew strength from their vibrancy in turn.

She showed him why they could not have had their meeting there.  Offered him the apple with its skin bright as a mirror, vivid with her greens and the browns of their hair.  Told him what it was. Its blessing and its curse: life, the Moon’s life, extended beyond belief. Like the gardens, stripped of their intensity in favor of a different kind of beauty.

He thought for an instant of that life, eternal but attenuated, exiled in time from the Earth and all he loved there for partaking too deeply of the alien.  He thought of his prince in the evenings, his face turned upward to the silent and barren Moon, where all he loved best in the world lived beyond his reach. He thought of the stars, with their wisdom balanced with their distant silence.

He looked at the woman before him, the princess in green, strong and alive, and that life redoubled by the way she held her breath when she looked back at him.  Waiting for his answer. Knowing what she dreaded it might be, but brave enough to ask him still.

The mirror-bright skin yielded to his teeth like any other apple’s flesh, silver torn to show a clean white beneath:  colorless, colorless, sweet as music, haunting as hope.

[](https://i.imgur.com/iJ9ReR2.jpg)


End file.
